Posted
by
Zonk
on Thursday October 06, 2005 @10:45AM
from the fight-fight-fight-fight-fight dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "The Guardian is reporting that the EU, obviously unimpressed with the US's refusal to relinguish control of the Internet, will be forming several comittees and forums with a mind to forcibly remove control of the Internet from the United States." From the article: "Old allies in world politics, representatives from the UK and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium. The issue of who should control the net had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world's governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting on it. But with the internet now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical."

I'm not one to regularly use strong profanities, but fuck 'em. Negotiations are one thing, and the EU/UN can feel free to negotiate until they're blue in the face. But if they want to force the issue, I'm thinking that we should "remind" our foreign allies that a country with our military might cannot and will not be forced. If need be, I highly recommend that the US resign from the UN and see how long it holds together without our monetary support.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The internet root servers are working fine. The UN has presented no compelling arguments as to why it should be turned over to an overly beaurocratic entity that has a poor track record for making joint ventures work. In absence of a compelling argument, the only thing that the UN should hear is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Keep in mind that the root servers are currently under the control of a private organization. While the servers themselves may reside in the US, the organization that controls them is a true international entity. The US government does not exert direct control over ICANN, and will not agree to do so in order to satisfy a UN hissy fit.

I can only speak for myself, but I would be ashamed of my government's actions if I lived in one of the UN countries that is pushing this resolution. I think this quote from the article sums it up:

"The idea of the council is so vague. It's not clear to me that governments know what to do about anything at this stage apart from get in the way of things that other people do."

Your argument is very sloppy. At the beginning you note that this is a push from the UN and the EU, but then continue on solely in an anti-UN tirade. All of your anti-UN arguments cannot necessarily be applied to the EU, so you are missing about half of what you need to convince someone who disagrees with you.

Your argument, sir, is none at all. You have censured me for having incomplete information, yet you have failed to complete it yourself.

As for the UN and EU split, that was a distinction made by the fine article, and one I only carried as far as the article did. Beyond that, we are speaking purely of the UN. The UN *has* made resolutions, then failed to act on them. The UN *has* censured the United States for acting on those resolutions. The perfect example of this has been the Iraq war, which was a UN resolution that the UN got upset about when the US took action. Do you deny these things? If so, please be more detailed.

It's easy to say, "ha ha, you're wrong", but it's much more difficult to carry on a reasonable ccnversation.

The UN *has* censured the United States for acting on those resolutions. The perfect example of this has been the Iraq war, which was a UN resolution that the UN got upset about when the US took action. Do you deny these things? If so, please be more detailed.

France (and other security councle members) said before voting on the last UN resolution that it was not allowing it to be used as an excuse for military action. The resolution was made to force Saddam to allow weapon inspectors. If military action would be necessary a new UN resolution would be have to be made with a new vote. The US went anyway without such a resolution, and has got the ass kicked in Iraq with a war done under false pretenses. Now the US administration is using the UN resolution as an excuse for invading a sovereign nation!!! Of course, it is the same administration that is trying to undermind UN on every turn. Make up your mind, either you follow what UN says and you don't invade, or you invade and take responsibility for your own action without blaming the UN. Show some balls.

You miss the principle of Charity. Rather than call his logic invalid because he started with "EU/UN" and then dropped it in favor of just "UN", you should charitably add the "EU/" yourself and see if his argument holds up. Otherwise, you're just nitpicking at spelling errors at best or launching a veiled ad hominem "UN-hating gingoistic bigot!" attack at worst. As always win you ignore Charity, you may win points with the audience, but logic isn't a popularity contest.

That said, you completely failed to address his major arguments, which were:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

ICANN is a private company

The UN is not the right body for this

That the UN, an American creation, should now try to bully the US into giving up control of the Internet, another American creation, seems to us the height of arrogance.

There are obvious counterpoints to all of these, and I only consider #3 to be worthwhile. But you didn't make those counterpoints at all.

What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.

What's really at stake in this struggle is who will have the power to block network access to and from a given country. Some countries are afraid of the US having that power, which they would "never" use, while the US is afraid of the UN having that power, which they also would "never" use.

WHAT monetary support? The US is billions upon billions of dollars in arrears with regard to UN dues. Besides, based on American Foreign Policy, the UN would probably be very thankful for the US dropping out... then you'll have to pay for your own messes when you invade sovereign nations under false pretences.The fact is that the Internet has moved beyond the national level. Whether you like it or not, the US' role WILL WANE. Taking a hard-line stance will, potentially, simply ensure that the rest of the wo

"I'm not one to regularly use strong profanities, but fuck 'em. Negotiations are one thing, and the EU/UN can feel free to negotiate until they're blue in the face. But if they want to force the issue, I'm thinking that we should "remind" our foreign allies that a country with our military might cannot and will not be forced. If need be, I highly recommend that the US resign from the UN and see how long it holds together without our monetary support."

Let's see how long the US holds together without the monetary support of the rest of the world. If countries like China were to just stop buying your government debt (let alone trying to get rid of it) then you won't even be able to pay for your mighty military. You've already given up control of your country and destiny to foreign powers who could crush you and the global economy if they had to.

And people with your attitude wonder why there is so much rampant anti-Americanism around the world today. You're too arrogant and conceited to see it. Thank goodness 99% of the Americans I know are fantastic people and don't live up to this stereotype.

If countries like China were to just stop buying your government debt (let alone trying to get rid of it) then you won't even be able to pay for your mighty military.

Actually we weren't using deficit spending to pay for our military (or anything else for that matter) until Dubya took office and gave a giant tax cut to the rich. Based on that fact I'd say that we really don't require you buying up all our debt to pay for our war machine.

And people with your attitude wonder why there is so much rampant anti-Americanism around the world today. You're too arrogant and conceited to see it.

And people with your attitude wonder why Americans distrust the UN and dislike Europe. I've heard Europeans pick apart every part of America from our welfare system, our politics, our religious beliefs, our support of Israel, our banking system, etc etc etc. You call us arrogant? You are too arrogant to think that just maybe we are right once in awhile.

> Let's see how long the US holds together without the monetary support of the> rest of the world.

Just a point; if anyone tried to destroy the US monetarily, the effect on the rest of the workl would be easily as bad. The dependency works both ways. Yes, the US is dependent of foreign trade, but most of the nations we trade with are dependent on it as well. Some few nations would just suffer loss of income and products, but many would suffer pains equal to some of the worst natural disasters.

> And people with your attitude wonder why there is so much rampant> anti-Americanism around the world today. You're too arrogant and conceited> to see it.

Just a point. There are a few hundred million people in the US. All of them are not arrogant and conceited, any more than all the French are rude and smelly, all Muslims are terrorists, or all the Chinese are great at math.

Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure. A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU. And we aren't interested, now or ever.

> Thank goodness 99% of the Americans I know are fantastic people and> don't live up to this stereotype.

Good to hear it. But stereotypes are like that. Most of the what the world knows about the US is garbage, heavily influenced by Hollywood. Just as most of what most Americans know about the Middle East is from Hollywood bull and news reports showing scenes of war and terror.

Maybe you should consider who is pushing who in this issue. The US have been repeatedly called upon to relinguish control about the root servers.
The clear statement was: "No, we will not". Some folks ask: "Well, why not?"
Now the EU and other countries will install their own root DNS servers and that's the end of the story.

I expect that given the preceeding agreement, and the relative simplicity of changing control of the root servers that live outside the US, the UN, EU, and the rest of the world expected negotiation at the recent PrepCom3 conference [theregister.co.uk]. What they got however was arrogance and statements that made it clear the US failed to understand they didn't have the choice to ignore past agreements.

So, the timetable is clear. ICANNs contract ends between March-Sept 2006 and during that time the new body will take control. Given the likelihood that they won't charge the registrar tax (remember that automated system), just about everyone will switch and Bush will end up with egg on his face. Thus I'll bet that in the real summit in November he will have to give in an acceptable change, since he really has no control of the matter.

Not to mention that not all root servers [wikipedia.org] are even in the US. According to that source:

However, a number of root servers lie outside the United States:
* i.root-servers.net is in Stockholm
* k.root-servers.net is in Amsterdam and London
* m.root-servers.net is in Tokyo

Couple that with anycast [wikipedia.org] and other emerging redundancy methods and I'd say we have a pretty global effort to maintain DNS going on.
Again, according to wikipedia.org:

Use of anycast to implement DNS
A number of the Internet root nameservers are implemented as large numbers of clusters of machines using anycast. The C, F, I, J and K servers exist in multiple locations on different continents, using anycast announcements to provide a decentralized service. As a result most of the physical, rather than nominal, root servers are now outside the United States. (emphasis mine)

Nobody invented it.The Internet is best described with organic terms, it grew out of the interconection of networks, colonising new nodes and spreading as more wanted it. The US is where it all started, not who created it. To say so surmounts to claiming that they built it as well, which is blatantly rediculous given it was and has always been since its cessation as a darpa and academic project, a commercial undertaking by telecomunications and networking companies.

The internet owes it existance to a number of things outside the US, Vint Cerf and the CERN folks as well for instance, in the very least that proves something, since "the net" by and large when disscussed is reffering to the interconected layer of html and hypertext linked pages of html that are the result of their work, without these the internet would likely have remaind a technical place, as it was before the AOL explosion and the september that never ended.

I personaly only care about this as it is jabing me in the side nagging partialy if theres a way to profit from this somehow... I know that the US isnt stupid enough to declare war over the internet, and the US isnt strong enough in any way other than militarily (they got them nukes and thats why i said that, no ones got as many as em) that they can attempt to force control over the rest of the world, this isnt some kind of US/UN cold war... this is a rediculous schism between those with the power and those who want them to relinquish it for a lower amount of control.

Oh the Irony... people talking about the US going to war over the internet... the very thing the US invented in case of a nuclear war...

those with the power and those who want them to relinquish it for a lower amount of control.

What control, what power? The US government stopped "operating" the internet a while ago. The government doesn't own any of the public backbones. The government doesn't own any of the public DNS root servers. The millions of miles of fibre that blanket the US aren't owned by the government.

The maybe was some point in the past when one entity could have "owned" the internet. The internet isn't some flat homogenious collection of nodes. It's a whole bunch of castles with draw bridges between them.

The fundamental problem is that the UN has a huge for sale sign on it and you simply cannot trust that policy will not be sold to the highest bidder. The oil for palaces scandal isn't even cool yet and the UN thinks that it has some sort of moral voice?

I can see some sort of international consortium running the root server system if you could trust that the censor queens would not have a voice in it. The UN is not that body. The UN will never be that body.

the US didn't invent the Internet, because the Internet is not a thing, but a concept.

The US funded the research which created the protocols upon which the Internet is based. The Internet first existed in the US, but it wasn't invented, it evolved.

The Internet itself is simply a bunch of individual networks which have agreed to connect together using those protocols. For that reason, any attempt to "control" it is fatally flawed. There's nothing to control. One can presume to "take control" of the DNS "root servers," but there's nothing preventing someone else from creating their own set. Who wins depends strictly upon which set the individual networks point to, and no one has control over that decision except the individual network admins.

Let the Euros piss and moan, after which if they don't like the US influence over the Internet, they can instead join Fidonet http://www.fidonet.us/joinfido.htm [fidonet.us]:)

Europe has been heavy contributors to networking in general since the early 1970s, and the internet since 1986 (the formation of RARE) (even before then, various national research projects contributed). So what if Europe wasn't involved in the initial formation of the internet? They've been heavily involved in its backbone technologies and its evolution ever since. Would you say that nobody should have the right to control their own zoning laws except Iraq because the first known zoning laws were invented by the Babylonians?

this isn't about the technologies, we aren't saying people can't create their own root servers and use them, we are saying you can't control our root servers that we have and still are sharing nicely with you.

What's with all this "we" business? Unless the poster actually had a founding hand in setting up what became the Internet, then how do they have any more right to it than anyone else? Because they happen to have been born in the same country as people who did? Accident of birth is no ethical basis for distributing non-local resources.

Do the US posters here really feel they have more in common with all other americans than they do with counterpart techies in Europe or Asia or Africa? Which community are you going to give precedence to? The US government that is comprised of tech-ignorant people with vested corporate interests (RIAA / MPAA, Pentagon, et al) and little adventurous spirit, or the IT literate and neophile tech community?

There is no reason why DNS could not be a distributed community effort. We've reached the level where such a thing could be implemented reliably. Hand it over to the techies. No-one will be happy with the means of modern information exchange under the control of one governmental organization no matter how much they tell us that "it's okay - we're the good guys."

People here spouting Fuck Em comments about the UN should ask themselves why they identify so much with their government. Why this sudden rush of Us and Them? Allowing a government to assign your loyalties to you by accident of birth seems a little old fashioned. Most posters at/. have a great deal more in common with each other than we do with our elected politicians and their corporate backers. If we're talking aobut wresting control of the Internet away from ICANN (which despite the name, certainly BUSH considers to be under the control of the US government), then we should be talking about wresting control of it for ourselves. Nation states are obsolete where the Internet is concerned, so please lets drop the sudden surge in Nationalism. The Internet is for all of us.

"Wow. So if a foreign spy asked you to sell secrets for some cash you would be a taker? No allegiance to country, that being a silly 'old fashioned value.'"

Well it's a hypothetical, because I value my integrity very highly. But if I lived in Nazi Germany I would have few qualms aiding the allies. If I lived in Massacheusetts in 1775, then I would have no problems betraying my British government. The nation does not have the power to tell me where my loyalties lie and is not entitled to them regardless of their actions. It can earn them the same way anyone else does.

The UN has been nothing but a pain for the longest time, passing resolutions that no one but the US is supposed to carry out. Then when we do carry out UN resolutions, we're censured as being an "empire builders" or "warmongerers". Isn't it nice that so many countries can tell us what to do while they sit on their high horses?

It's interesting. That's what many countries say about the US... That we sit on our high horse and tell them what to do.

Because when people don't care, Bad Things happen. It is vital that individuals are involved.

2. Why take their word over your own trust in your own county?

Why would anyone trust their own country? How many times do you need to be duped before you learn one of the foundations of American citizenship, which is "a healthy distrust of government"?

I personally trust the UN more than I trust the US. Why? Because the individuals of US government have shown me again and again that they do not fight for OUR interests, but rather THEIR OWN interests -- although they claim the opposite. At least the UN is more honest.

This came about because of the UN sanctions upon Iraq following the Kuwait invasion. The sanctions were intended primarily to keep Hussein from redeveloping a military force. A secondary agenda was to plummet the economy of the country such that the people rose up against Hussein.

The secondary agenda did not work. Hussein maintained an iron grip, as all despots do. He kept what he needed for himself and gave little to the people who had no say by force of a gun to their head.

The Oil for Food program was setup as a way to alleviate the suffering of the people, as well as get Iraqi oil back into the system to help lower global prices.

Now there were two failures:#1. A handful of people at the UN got involved in a kickback scheme in awarding the contracts.

#2. Hussein smuggled Oil, outside of the Oil for Food program.

The first failure is that of the UN, and it's being dealt with.

The second failure is the fault of the United States and the other nations who knew all along this was going on but turned a blind eye because we were hungry for that oil. Plus, the oil was smuggled through Turkey and Jordan and we didn't want to hurt their profits either.

But now we get back to the primary purpose of the UN sanctions. To keep Hussein from redeveloping a military power.

So what's more important to you? Obviously not the oil, and not the kickbacks, because we turned a blind eye. What was important was the sanctions keeping weapons out of Husseins army.

As it turns out, The UN sanctions were a success, as proven by the invasion of Iraq finding no WMDs and nothing even anything remotely resembling a defensive military force

The complaints regarding Oil for Food are politically motivated John Birch society bullshit.

Why do I care? Simply put, we live in a global economy and as such we are heavily dependent upon our neighbors to buy and sell goods. That means we need somewhat good relations with them.

If we create purposefully hostile relations, you know what happens? They suddenly realize "hey, you know, we don't really need the US", and they go off and form their own trading partners, etc. And Frankly, we are at a time in history now that the US is more dependent upon the world than the world is upon the US. Look at our trade imbalance, and then look at what nations like China, Russia and all of Europe have been doing. They're negotiating their own deals, outside of our arena.

2. Why take their word over your own trust in your own county?

Well that's a difficult question. My country, I trust. I think our business leaders understand in the broader scheme why what I said in #1 is important, and they are putting a great effort into making this work.

Our Government? Them I don't trust. Why should I/ The President doesn't represent America, he only represents his one political party. His policy goals and actions are not determined by what is in the best interest for the nation to help it grow, but rather what is in the best interests of maintaining their political power.

Never before have I seen this in my lifetime. And you can bet, that those living outside our country see it even more vividly as has been evidenced by the US's declining popularity.

You cannot force someone to like you. You cannot force someone to love you.

Agreed. Now find me a "time of need" in this situation. All I see is a bunch of member countries who want control of the toys, and have no clear direction on why or how they need them.

Bull. This is in fact a very simple matter. The internet is now a key part of the infrastructure of many countries and no matter if you like it or not, nations don't like it when a critical part of their infrastructure is controlled by a foreign government. The US wouldn't like and accept such a situation and other nations won't either, so the interesting question is not if this situation will change, but how it will change.

If they're going to try to "force" the US, I can certainly see the US resigning. The UN has been nothing but a pain for the longest time, passing resolutions that no one but the US is supposed to carry out. Then when we do carry out UN resolutions, we're censured as being an "empire builders" or "warmongerers". Isn't it nice that so many countries can tell us what to do while they sit on their high horses?
The next natural step after resigning would be to setup defensive positions in case someone wants to take it farther than that. I'm hoping that the member countries would be smart enough to leave things alone and recognize that a US resignation would be their own fault.

I know that people like you don't want to hear it, but being part of the UN is of great benefit to the US (do you really think the "war against terror" can be won by the US alone for example) so the US leaving the UN, thereby destroying the international system would be a very stupid move indeed, to put it mildly.

Btw., I'd really like to hear some examples of the US carrying out UN resolutions and then getting blamed for it. Thanks in advance.

I hope that was sarcasm? Because you may be surprised at what you find in the history of the internet's invention.

Hihi, watching people like you rave about how the US invented the internet is just to funny.

Why? First because it is pretty senseless. So what if they did? What follows from it? That only the US should be able to use the inernet? Well, have fun then, cause a global network is sure going to be useful when it's not global.
And what about other inventions? How about the US not using any technology that wasn't invented in the US? Wouldn't that be fun?

Second, what about the www? It sure wasn't invented in the US, but in Europe? So what follows from this? You guys keep the internet while we take the www? How utterly silly, childish and senseless.

I know that people like you don't want to hear it, but being part of the UN is of great benefit to the US (do you really think the "war against terror" can be won by the US alone for example) so the US leaving the UN, thereby destroying the international system would be a very stupid move indeed, to put it mildly.

I'd be real interested to hear how the UN has helped with the "war on terror"? It seems to me that the "war on terror" has continued despite the UN's attempted interference at every turn.

Btw., I'd really like to hear some examples of the US carrying out UN resolutions and then getting blamed for it. Thanks in advance.

How about UN Resolution 1441? To refresh your memory, that's the one that contains the admission by Iraq that they had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that they would dispose of those weapons, and that they would prove that disposal to the UN.

Iraq failed to do so. Maybe they did get rid of their WMDs, but part of their responsibility was to prove to the UN that those were destroyed, and not just hidden for later use.

So it was up to the UN to enforce it. The UN went against its own resolution and refused to enforce it. So the US was the one who got to do the actual "enforcing"... And once it was complete and Saddam was out of power, the world turned on us for going AGAINST the UN (despite the fact that it was simply enforcing the UNs own resolution).

Yea but unfortunatly they must have missed the fact that "George" knew that "Herb" was a a viscious killer that had killed many people.

So are half of the club members, including George. In fact George used to pay Herb to beat people up, but now he is upset because Herb does not want to be a pawn anymore.

BECAUSE GEORGE IS NOT A PUSSY LIKE MOST OF THE MEMBERS OF THIS STUPID CLUB...

George is a coward and a bully and a liar and everyone knows it.

...but stays in because he knows the damn club would fall apart without him, and he cares about those little guys.

Heh, not likely. He stays in the club because he does not want the others to gang up on him, because he needs them as much as they need him financially, because he owes half of them a lot of money and does not want his car repossessed, because he and some other club members used to get in fights and this was the only place they could talk without much risk of a real fight breaking out, and because he is smart enough to know isolation makes you weak. He also know if he picks a fight with the biggest clique in the club they will probably kick his ass and take his stuff and because he knows Lee could go kung-fu on his ass and probably turn him into dog meat.

The smart ones know that it's not him that needs us, it's us that needs him.

Need him for what? To borrow money from them? To try to pick fights? To extort money from the littlest guys? Any one who is fool enough to think the world needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs the world is an idiot of unbelievable proportions, and any American who believes it is just promoting the stupid, arrogant American stereotype. The U.S. has lower standards of living, worse education, and more civil rights problems than about half of the U.N. members. They bring nothing special to the table.

You'll find it was created by scientists of various nationalities working together to make something useful.

Of various nationalities? Yes, but these were employees of American universities that had vested interests by US tax payers.

If I were an American workign in Germany and was part of an engineering team that built some great technology I can not suddenly decide that it belongs to the American people simply because I, as an American, worked on it.

"The United States is the largest financial contributor to the UN, and has been every year since its creation in 1945. U.S. contributions to the UN system in 2003 were well over $3 billion. In-kind contributions include items such as food donations for the World Food Program.

The U.S.-assessed contribution to the UN regular budget in 2003 was $341 million, and to UN specialized agencies was over $400 million. The United States also contributed $686 million in assessments to the peacekeeping budget; $57 million for the support of the international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; and $6 million for preparatory work relating to the Capital Master Plan to renovate the UN Headquarters in New York. Moreover, each year the United States provides a significant amount in voluntary contributions to the UN and its affiliated agencies and activities, largely for humanitarian and development programs."

Every part of your statement is incorrect. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

"In December 2000, the Assembly agreed to revise the scale of assessments to make them better reflect current global circumstances. As part of that agreement, the regular budget ceiling was reduced from 25 to 22 percent; this is the rate at which the United States is assessed. The United States is the only member that meets that ceiling, all other members' assessment rates are lower."

We should have pulled out of this idiotic thing [UN] a long time ago, and perhaps this will be the final strawMaybe you should just obliterate the rest of the world so that there will be no problem after that with any foreign entity. What do you think?

Distressingly for everyone, many of your fellow countrymen seem to agree with you, at least in inclination, if not in extent.

And they aren't being sarcastic.

The current brouhaha is merely the first public example of the US coming into conflict with the rest of the world as a result of recent changes in its image.

You (the USA) are currently the only global superpower.

Nobody minded this too much[1] while you were seen as trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society on earth.

In the last two presidential terms, your reputation has become more and more tarnished (sorry, but it's true), to the point that the benefit of the doubt has simply been withdrawn. Please note that I'm not saying whether this is right, wrong, fair or unfair... merely that it is the case.

No, I don't expect you to agree, or even to realise. You're part of the US, famously one of the most insular cultures on earth, and people are always the last to hear gossip about themselves anyway.

Since you are no longer trusted to be trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, uncorrupt or free, you are no longer adoringly looked up to by other nations. They no longer feel safe banking on your currency, they no longer trust you as an honest broker in international politics, and they sure as hell don't want you in any kind of position of power over them.

For the entire lifetime of the net nobody's cared who ran the root servers. Now, the explosive rise of the internet's importance has met the free-falling reputation of the US, and it's hardly surprising that other countries are getting antsy about your position of "authority" over them in this area.

Short version: You were the Google of international politics, now you're more the Microsoft. Expect a lot more international anti-trust arguments in the future.

Footnotes:

[1] Well, most of the relatively powerless middle east didn't like it much, but the West, the far East and their allies didn't mind, and China (as always) just studiously ignored everyone else.

Holy crap, it took you guys until the last two presidential terms to stop trusing us?

We've had our fingers in everyone's pies since WWII. We've gone around telling other countries what government they can and can't have. Our little tiff with the Soviet Union caused trouble for all kinds of places that weren't otherwise involved at all.

We've ignored our own constitution and persecuted people's freedom of speech (see the McCarthy trials). We've broken treaty after treaty with the American Indians. We've fueled wars and sold weapons to both sides.

We've funded revolutions, we've changed loyalties (see Vietnam and Cuba), and we've pulled every stop to build U. S. market dominance in the world. We've got a military that we can drop damn near anywhere and if not take over, at least cause a lot of strife.

I wouldn't trust us. Hell, I don't, and I used to be in the U. S. military.

Granted though, in my opinion, you asked for it. We had a policy of letting Europeans kill each other all they wanted without our involvement until Germany dragged us into WWI by trying to get Mexico to attack us. Then, when we decided to go back to our policy of leaving everyone else alone, Germany and Japan dragged us back into it with WWII. It's always one asshole that ruins it for everyone. Saddam dragged us into the gulf war by attacking one of our allies, and good ol' bin Laden, in an attempt to get us out of the middle east, started the current chain of events that led to our invading Afghanistan (personally, I think Iraq was just finishing daddy's work for ol' dubya, but that's just me).

We're the big kid on the block, and if you're tired of our bullying, you're going to have to fight back. And I'm not talking with words, mind you. The American people don't care, by and large, and our politicians have no reason to put an end to it. Until then, you're just going to have to wait until either an economic crisis cripples us, or civil war breaks out. I don't see either happening any time soon.

So the argument there is that because a private company controls the Internet the many foreign governments and populations that rely upon it should be content?

Incorrect. My argument is:

1. That the private company is already an international entity that serves international interests.2. That said company has done an excellent job to date, and has shown no need for a government run entity.3. That it is not the US policy to force private companies to give up ownership.4. That the UN has no compelling argument for wanting control other than the fact that it wants it.5. That the UN has a far poorer track record on joint ventures than ICANN has.

That is the argument, and I daresay that it's pretty ironclad. The moment someone can poke a reasonable hole in that logic, I will change my position. So far, no one has done more than insult me for my "american elitist position". Boo hoo. Find an argument that works, then we'll talk.

Are you really talking about ICANN or is there some other private company involved here?

ICANN right now arguably is illegal. They unconstitutionally removed the "At Large" members of their board, and the decisions they've made since then really have had little or no mandate. Meanwhile they sat on proposals to expand the range of DNS domains for years, announcing new TLDs without doing anything about it, and they continue to allow Verisign to run.COM despite well documented abuses of their position.

Your description of the UN situation is ludicrous too. The ITU, for example, has a stellar record of fair, reasonable, standardization of telecommunication standards. And right now, the position of non-US companies is that they want such a body in charge of the type of thing ICANN is, because ICANN is both a US-body and a body that's proven repeatedly it cannot be trusted. ICANN isn't even answerable to US law, it's proven that by the At Large fiasco. How is it reasonable to put any trust in it? And why are so many so dead set against independent, accountable, bodies being put in charge of some of the most important consensus-driven decision making activities currently decided by unaccountable, anti-democratic, elitist, dysfunctional, body, answerable only slightly to one of the governments whose citizens access the net, with a track record of fucking things up?

Merely saying this doesn't make it true. It currently serves international interests on abstractly and retains prerogative to ignore the input of various countries as it sees fit.

Please name how the ICANN has failed to perform its duties. I can name how it *has* performed its duties:

1. It has successfully kept the root servers highly available to all countries.2. It has spent significant time with foreign interests looking to meet the needs of these people.3. It has shown forethought in decisions, not jumping on new concepts that could be harmful in the long term.4. Yet it has managed to approve a variety of top level domains (including the new.EU) and shown good judgement in handing over domain control such as the recent hand over of the.Iq domain.

Doing an excellent job to date is debatable and, regardless, offers no guarantee that it will continue to do so as political situations change.

Show me a guarantee that the UN will do as good or better job. If you cannot, then why place more trust in an entity that has no track record on management of these servers over an entity that DOES have a track record?

[Forcing private companies] is not really relevant. This is an international issue as the Internet is an international resources with countless billions invested by numerous nations all of which rely upon the system to function properly.

No, it is relevant. US laws protect against illegal seizure, and seizure without compensation. Show a REAL ARGUMENT as to why ICANN's holdings should be seized, THEN the US government can consider seizure and compensation.

You've mischaracterized even that basic argument entirely: the UN, or rather, the international community, wants to move control from ICANN to a truly international organization that can operate transparently and that is required to acknowledge and assimilate the input from those governments represented in the UN. Again, the alternative is just to trust ICANN to play fair.

Considering the lack of evidence that ICANN is not "playing fair", I fail to see how this argument is any stronger. I'll say it again, find a reasonable argument and I'll switch positions. Simply, "we don't trust an entity that has shown overall good judgement and has worked well for the past decade" is not a reasonable argument.

[UN has a far poorer track record] is true, but is not sufficient to override the objections to your prior points.

It is however, sufficient to point out the problem with simply turning over control to the UN. No one has yet shown what is wrong with ICANN control. No strong arguments exist. In absense of such arguments, the relative histories of the two entities must be compared. ICANN has done a satisfactory job at its task and has shown no signs that it has been doing any poorer in recent history. If anything, the ICANN has been slowly improving. You have agreed, OTOH, that the UN has had a poor track record in other joint ventures. Why change something that obviously works the way it is?

Look, your whole argument is bs. This comes down to China and the EU saying 'we want it' and the US saying 'um... no, this is ours and we don't want to just give it to you'. Right now DNS is actually run by various companies, with oversight by ICANN, which has oversight from the US government. DNS is an opt-in system, and everyone has opted in to the one we have. What we have going on here is a few politicians that don't understand tech, as evidenced by their repeated lack of understanding on the subject at every opportunity, that have decided to piss with the system. The Internet works without government control, and DNS works and runs without the US government managing it.

If you don't like it, then set up your own DNS. If you think DNS needs to be more decentrilized (which is kind of stupid to do), then write a set of protocols to do so. If people like it, they will use it. Just like how DNS started to be used.

Why in the hell do we need the UN trying to forcibly take control of anything? We have independant countries for very good reasons. The UN is not a lawmaking body, and the EU isn't supposed to be either. How does this have any basis in the foundings of these organizations?

No, this whole set of shenanigans perpetrated by the UN and the several countries is ridiculous, and just about the worst possible way of doing it.

It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.

Is that a fact? Right or wrong have you looked at our Government lately? Do you really think that international consensus will bother us in the least?

I'm sure my friends in Europe will take exception to this line of reasoning but why shouldn't the US retain control over the root servers? We built the Internet in the first place. Do you really want to see it turned over to the UN?

In the early days, an enlightened Department of Commerce (DoC) pushed and funded expansion of the internet.

Not only did we invent and build it -- we paid for it. That doesn't entitle us to something? The British got to define the Prime Meridian based on their global empire. Subsequently this has defined GMT. Wouldn't it make more sense for GMT to be based on New York (the center of the World Financial System and headquarters of the United Nations)? Isn't that whole argument just as silly as insisting that DoC hand over the root servers? Where is the problem here that they want to fix?

I don't agree. Control of the root servers effectively means that they could seriously damage a country's internet structure (and subsequently economy) IF they wanted to. It could effectively mean war by technological starvation. There SHOULD be a united body handling the internet. Full stop. Whether it's the UN or not is a null issue, the UN do a heck of a lot of good generally, so I have no problem with it.

NEWSFLASH:Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.

Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)

The US and Europe may be far and away the biggest economic blocs in the world at the moment, but we're going to have to get used to sharing economic might sooner than some people realize. And I doubt China (and India) will have the same ideas about where the centres of world power should be that we do.

Growth rate of US economy: not much. A few percent possibly.Growth rate of China's economy: huge. About 11% IIRC.

Which means China is on course to become the largest economy in the world in about 30 years' time. (Figures all OTOH, but there or thereabouts.)

Err. No. If you see a linear trend line, it is generally foolish to extrapolate out that trend line 30 years. China has and will continue to see a lot of growth. Thinking that they are going to maintain 11% growth for the next 30 years on the other hand is close to insane.

People don't realize this, but business in China has a LOT of problems. The most obvious problems are the extremely high level of corruption and constant government meddling. China has a lot of people just starting to get out of third world style poverty and very cheap labor, but it isn't the business utopia people seem to think it is.

One of the other little talked about problems with China is their gross inefficiency. When the oil crunch comes, China and the developing world are going to be the ones to be hit the hardest. Granted, the first world will feel the burn too, especially in the indirect cost of having the developing world's economies getting a good shaking, but the pain in places like China will be much greater. The amount of oil it takes to grow the GDP in china 1% is significantly higher then that of US, and higher still then places like Europe and Japan.

I am not saying China can't become a super power, but it has some very serious hurdles to overcome first. China is still a mess politically, they are extremely bureaucratic and corrupt, their market is riding essentially only on the fact that they have cheap labor and a billion potential consumers, and their levels of oil consumption per percent of growth of the GDP makes the US look down right green. China has its share of problems. Boiling down China's rise as a super power to seeing a 11% growth rate is a naïvely simplistic way of examining the issue.

The simple fact of the matter is that the United States could destroy most of the economies in the World simply by telling our citizens not to buy or sell things from/to them.

What, like Cuba? They may be suffering, but last I check there were still there, doing business, living their lives free of US control. Sometimes freedom is more important than money..

I have a whole lot of problems with them and since it was my tax dollars and not the EU's that paid for the Internet in the first place (from the R&D to the initial deployments) I'll be damned if my Government turns it over to the World.

Then be damned, because you will lose control one way or another. You did NOT pay for the cables in countries outside the US. You did not pay for the routers, the power usage, the servers that are outside the US. You payed for a small part of the internet that connects your military servers and some academic institutions. Last I checked, no one was demanding that you give the World control over these segments.

"We" (Americans) didn't invent it. It was a much more impressive collaboration from people from many countries, not the least of whom is Tim Berners-Lee [wikipedia.org] [Wikipedia.org].
I'll agree that we funded it, and greatly helped it come to fruition but let's not make it look like "We" think it was the singular efforts of one country and one people that birthed the Internet as we now know it. To do so not only makes "Us" look quite egocentric.
I don't believe

Excuse me, but the Internet (in the form of the ArpaNet and DarpaNet and finally the Internet) had been around for nearly twenty years before Tim Berners Lee did anything. He distributed his magic, shiny "web browser" across FTP and Gopher, two services that had fifteen years of use behind them before he came along. I was playing MUDs in 1985 across Telnet, long before Tim Berners Lee even got hired by CERN. At that time, the number of non-US nodes could have been measured in the dozens and they were almost all universities or research facilities. At the same time, companies in America were already fighting over IP addresses.

Your comment, "how technically it is very difficult for one country to "control the internet."" You think that's hard, wait until you see a committee of twenty countries trying to do it.

And I just can't wait until the UN/EU tries to impose a "Root Fee" to pay for managing it, that every man, woman, and child with an Internet conneection will have to pay. If you don't think the UN is thinking about this, then you don't understand the most fundamental rule of politics -- "It's all about the money."

You paid for the part of it that resides in the US. You didn't pay for the part of it outside of the US. And many, many, agencies, contributed to the technology used. The World Wide Web, for instance, was a European creation.

Either way, this is irrelevent. The point is that, today, the Internet is a global network. It needs to be "governed" globally, not by one major player. I'm finding the nationalistic cries of outrage posted here difficult to stomach. Something tells me that if it were proposed that control of the World Wide Web be handed over to the EU, on the grounds it's a European invention, you'd be pretty pissed.

Tim Berners Lee (Who currently resides with his wife and child in Boston, MA) did develop the http protocol while working for CERN in 1989-1991. However, it's clearly a derivative of many other internet protocols. Hypertext markup is a subset of SGML. Thus, TBL's contribution was that he happened to work at a place with a whole lot of information, a lot of SGML data, and an Internet connection. He created a simple program that would let scientists communicate data in an easily readable form over the Internet.

He never dreamed that the "Web" would become anything like it has become. The idea that he was standing over people's shoulders and forging the Web from red-hot steel with his bare hands is totally misleading. Yes, he put up the first web site (info.cern.ch) on August 6, 1991. Big deal. Who created the sockets library he was using? Who created the RFC system that let him publish his RFC? What country invented the programming language he wrote it in? Heck, what country built the machine he wrote it on? And what country produced the Apple HyperDeck that inspired him to use internal hyperlinks? When he wrote HTTP, there were new protocols hitting the Net almost every day. His just happened to be the one to catch on because it was mind-numbingly simple.

If this is your "reasoning" that the EU should own the Internet, then I imagine that you'd want to enslave everyone in the World, after all Francis Crick was from England, and he discovered DNA. Let us all hail our new EU overlords.

I'm infuriated with this idiocy! Must everything be "governed"? The Internet is currently "governed" by a mixture of post-hippies, libertarians, and "cyberanarchists". This is to say that the Internet is not "governed" that much at all. This is what sticks in the craw of the world's more statist regimes: that the primary means of communication is not controlled, regulated, or taxed. The Internet is insufficiently "governed". I like it that way.:D

We invented the type of government where the people are represented by representatives in a legislative body, separate from an executive branch, commonly known as the Republic. Your use of the aforementioned type of government infringes on our Intellectual Property rights. Please cease to use the aforementioned type of government within 30 days.

Best regards,
The Old World

and build it -- we paid for it.

The internet is, by definition, the sum of its constituing networks. The constituing networks are build and paid by their respective owners. Basic property rights. You don't own anything you can't show the receipt for.
In the case of the domain name system, that is payed for by the owners of domain names. Year after year they pay for it through their registrars.

That doesn't entitle us to something?

Other then whining on/.? No.

You want more examples? Graham Bell invented the phone. Does that mean the US has the final say in deciding whether Moldavia gets country prefix 0418 or 0418? No, that is decided by the ITU, which is a special organization of the UN. (Which are known to be anti-American communists, having done such terrible things as providing North America with the obscenely long country code "1" just to make it harder for the rest of the world to call the US.)

It's their obvious strategy. There is absolutely no reason they have to live with us controlling the internet. Just put their own root DNS servers in place, and legally mandate that all of their ISPs switch over. It's not rocket science, but it will fragment the internet a bit.

But you miss the real point. Your solution is technically feasible, sensible, cheap, quick, easy and obviates all the contention. But then....

WHAT WILL THEY GRANDSTAND OVER!!??!!

I mean, who ever got elected for making sensible arguments. You get elected for mandating hearings on steroid use among professional athletes or intefering in state matters like the right of a husband to let his wife die a natural death. Yes, I realize these are particular instances of American issues, but it is the same in all democracies. All the politicians have to make a large hue and cry over insubstantial or trivial issues in order to remove attention from the fact that they're basically doing nothing or are powerless to do anything about real issues that they were elected/appointed to do.

I'm with one of the earlier posters. Tell 'em all to fuck off. They can create their own root servers any time they want. For redundancy reasons, it is something they should do anyway.

Newsflash: nobody cares about the "Spirit of the UN." They only have the right if the US gives it to them or if they can take it, and since neither of those things look like they will happen, they have no right to the DNS servers, only a DESIRE to have them.

Do we really need a government, or super-government in charge of this? Can't we have a decentralized network of root servers working together on this co-operatively? If one server or network became consistently unreliable, people would stop using it.

I've been saying this all along. The only debate that seems to be out there is which government should control the Internet. The best answer is NONE. Not the US, not the EU, but private citizens. Once Gov't gets their dirty little claws on a thing, you see things like China's little section of the Internet.

I honestly don't believe that any government has the right to control it. What needs to happen is for private citizens to take it back.

Well, I guess it is time to kill DNS alltogether. DNS is centralized by design. Tim Berners-Lee doesn't like centralized designs, and has referred to DNS as the achilles heel of the internet, and I think he has been thinking about replacements. What we need to remove control from any monolithic, centralized body. Make it webly. Then, they can argue over themselves, but control, they won't get.

...basically it amounts to "EU and UN say 'Give us the root servers" and the US says "No, we invented and paid for them and we're keeping them." All this seems to boil down to the E(U)N having to establish their own set of roots, which is where we started from, is it not? Wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just set up an alternate root system without all the political grandstanding? Does anyone in the E(U)N honestly think the US was going to invest billions in something, only to invest billions more to hand it over because Tunisia thought they should?

-theGreater.

PS: Yes, I realize only the -summit- was in Tunisia; I needed a smaller country to make my point.

Our (U.S.) government has become less predictable and some would argue less stable. We've been giving anybody who looks our direction the finger on nearly every issue we can. And we've been doing odd things at home, also. From the WMD/Iraq thing to erosion of Civil Liberties, to the ultra-right neo-conservatism to the President suggesting that he needs the power to use the military for law enforcement if he deems it necessary. It's no wonder that the other nations of the world are a little skittish about the U.S. controlling something so vital to their national interests.

It's really not that hard to imagine, for instance, that our government might force the root name servers to stop handing out answers for the.ir domain as a type of sanction against Iran. I use Iran as an example because they are currently one of our hot buttons. But who might we be angry at next? China, France? How about Brazil? One of our religious leaders has called for the assassination of that nation's elected President.

That all probably seems like hyperbole. It does to me, too. But if you're the leader of a foreign country, it would seem a lot less so. And if you're responsible for your nation's economy and the internet plays a significant role in that, I'd say you've got a responsibility to mitigate such risks. While I think the root DNS is safe with us, it doesn't surprise or anger me that the rest of the world doesn't agree. If anything, it surprises me that it hasn't happened sooner.

We are presumably discussing the Internet as an international network, and here the answer is obviously, "no-one can own this", because ownership will mean subversion of the Internet for political goals and thus its destruction.

But if we mean the millions of small and large (e.g. China) internets, each of these can and probably should be owned.

The problem of root DNS servers appears to be an artificial one, relatively easily solved if there was the political will to relinquish control and allow the free creation of arbitrary top level names. There are parallels where control has successfully been relinquished and the results are a nice mix of anarchy and order, suiting everyone. Newsnet is a good example.

I think it would be very interesting to see a divided internet. Once in a while things need to shaken up in order for progress to be made. IPV6 is too long in coming and ultimately since it's easier not to change, things are at most moving very slowly. But really, "the internet" is a global entity with global interest and should be managed globally. And if it takes segmentation prior to reunification, then so be it -- I'm ready to wait out the storm... but then again, such a separation will harm the US far less than any other part of the world. It would be REALLY interesting, though, to see what happens to the SPAM industry if such segmentation were to happen.

The UN is an international organization, and although I am not opposed to the idea of a forum where all countries can gather to discuss important matters, I am worried about the UN gaining too much power.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't dictatorships that terrorize their people have the same ability to vote in important matters as democratic countries? Hasn't there been a history of less than decent governments being represented in, say the Security Council? I mean, what is China doing there?

Regarding the Internet, I'm leaning towards saying "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". It's working OK the way it does today (although Verisign needs to get the boot). I also want to make sure that China and other such governments have no say over my Internet connection.

And the EU sure seems to be taking the hardball approach to this! I can't even see how they can possible force the control away from the US. They will be making complete fools of themselves if they end up splitting the Internet. Unlikely, but I'm sure they are willing to do so just to prove that the EU has the balls to stand up to the US...

So what if "bad" countries can vote? It's like democracies that still allow the neighborhood bully to vote, or the spouse abuser. Or even the people who want the government to endorse Mormonism as the national religion (cf Orin Hatch). They still get to vote, but why should they? Because that's the whole freakin point of voting in the first place, that everybody gets one vote regardless of whether you agree with them ideologically or not, or whether you like them, or whether they have the most money or power.

The USA created the Internet as we know it today, it is their creation, from their tax payers money. As much as I dislike many things that the USA is doing and has done in the past. I'm going to have to say that I'm behind them on keeping control of what is theirs, which happens to be the foundation of the Internet as we know it.

Just due to the fact that it is now a globally used system that effects everyone in the modern world does not give any body/group the right to demand rights of control over that system. Just as new protocols are created over time and are layered ontop of the old to keep the system running regardless of 'obsolete' hardware/software that might be in some remote corner of the web, so to should the U.N create a system that runs along side the current one if it so desperatly wants control. That is the most logical solution to the problem at hand. Countries and corporations can create 'internal' networks that overide the current systems of the Internet.

The fact that the developing world does not see that as the most logical first step attempt at a solution at hand is evidence that they are not ready to have control over a system such as complex as the Internet.

So some places outside the US, as is their right, are going to set up their own root servers. This kind of thing has been done many times before. [wikipedia.org] Those other alt-roots have never been very heavily subscribed. Naturally that reference level could change, if other countries mandate that their ISPs use the new alt-roots.

But you know what? To the extent that the data coming out of the latest alt-roots conflict with the ICANN, they will be generally perceived as broken, particularly but not exclusively from the point of view of users in the US. For example, domain names will fail to resolve, or will resolve to the "wrong" place. If the new alt-roots do much of anything differently, users will start pointing their DNS clients at nameservers that resolve up to the ICANN. So for example if China sets up something that won't resolve (say) freechina.net, the individual users will soon learn to point their DNS clients at US nameservers.

The only way I can see these new alt-roots being heavily subscribed is if they make sure they agree with the ICANN everywhere ICANN has a route to a name, and if their use is legally mandated so that ISPs are forced to go through the hassle of changing. If they do that, the only value that they could possibly add would be of including extra domains that resolve for the alt-roots, and that ICANN does not yet have. Is there really a lot of demand for such a thing? I'm not sure.

That would be a result of the EU not being a country. ccTLD = *Country Code* Top Level Domain. They can use.uk,.fr,.de, etc, for their sites. I doubt very strongly that you would have people rapidly changing to the EU system, with its unproven reliability and unproven interoperability. I would say that people would likely rapidly switch to using the real root servers that the US oversees.

This doesn't spell the end to ICANN at all. All it does is reinforce the idea that the EU thinks they control the economic members and doesn't really respect member countries, and that the UN is powerless. People bitch and moan that the US tries to take things from other countries, well here is the exact same thing.

The Internet is an agreement between interested parties using a common protocol... nothing more, and nothing less. If the EU wants to force the issue, it's fine. Let them renegotiate the agreement. See how far they get. If they force the issue, and begin to change how DNS works, or how IP addresses are assigned, then they have broken the agreement, and have effectively made a different Internet. A different agreement that will get cut off from the regular Internet so as not to interfere. A different Internet without anything on it that people want.

So, this story has only been posted a short while, and already the posts saying "We'll do what we damn well please. We're untouchable. We can do without you all. We'll just pull the plug on things. We invented it. We paid for it." are running rife.All modded up as insightful and informative.

Well.. That's the reason the UN really wants things to be run by an international board, not a US controlled one. The net, as the article states, is now vital to many countries.Which means the rest of the world would also like to have it's fair share of the say, without having to listen to the US, which has recently showed it's absolute contempt for international view (and in the posts here, is showing it all over again).The aim, from my interpretation of the article, is that an international body, that fills the shoes that ICANN now fills will be formed as a technical arena to ensure that the needs of the world are fulfilled.The rest of the world is perfectly able to build it's own root servers, although this will then lead to the US being cut off if it refuses to use the new ones, and fragmentation of the whole will occur.This is what the ongoing argument is about.Not 'Give us the root servers. All of them. Give us what you paid for.'.The infrastructure outside the US was paid for outside the US, by the companies that operate outside the US.Without that foreign buy in to a Standard, there would be no worldwide internet. It would be the US military net it started off as, or perhaps their academic net, like UK had JANET, and Europe's other competing national networks.What is being requested is that the ownership becomes joint. No one country can pull the plug and get overall control to suddenly yank a whole area out of the system at will.

The amount of inventions used in the US created outside of it (or before it existed) are many and multifarious.Without those, it's entirely probably that the ideas that lead to the creation of the Internet would have not formed for a goodly long time.But, the ideas did come around in the US, and honestly, all credit to the guys that did come up with it. And for the forsight to put it into the academic arena, which led to it's increase in scope worldwide (I still remember the net from it's almost entirely academic days).

Now the choice comes to either make it a truly worldwide and international entity and show real enlightenment, or to hoard it, use it as a lever to gain other concessions, or a stick to beat people with if needed.This whole issue is a lot more complex than most here give it credit for.Personally, I'm interested in seeing how it evolves.I think a lot of the character of both the UN and the US will come out here, and I very much doubt that either one will end up smelling of roses.

I posted a comment or two the last time this came up, but now I will take a different tack: it is understandable that they want some way to maintain access to their country level domains even if the US goes utterly nuts. I suggested that is just what they should do.

Now they want to force the issue, I think we should help them along. Tell the EU and the UN to pick a date on which the US root zone file will no longer be responsible for containing the look-up information for non US country domains such as.br and.tv. Starting this day the US root zone file would point to the UN zone file for look-ups for the domains. The UN file would of course point to the US file for the.us domains and for the existing international TLDs such as.com and.org. The UN could also create their own new TLDs, maybe.comnet or something, but the old ones stay with the US.

Now if they actually did this, the US part of the internet would not be order the control of an organization that is not beholden in the slightest way to the American people, while the rest of the world gets to deal with something administered by the UN or the EU. Really, what is so hard about this?

Oh, as for the internet being essential to the infrastructure of some countries, might it be said that the internet pretty much IS the infrastructure of the US economy, government and whotnot? Turn off the internet everywhere, and the transistion in the US would be substantially more severe than the transistion in Brazil (I am sure they would still get their taxes somehow).

We don't really care what the world opinion is. The United States will never relinquish control of the internets. Ever.

More to the point, the US doesn't have any control over the Internet it could hand over to the UN even if it wanted to. The article talks about the DNS system - or so I presume anyway, since it mentions root servers; it doesn't actually state anything about DNS. The US currently hosts the root DNS servers. Those root servers are special only in that everyone keeps using them; they have any authority only because everyone agrees that they do. There is nothing whatsoever stopping the UN from making its own root servers and telling everyone to use them; they will be ignored, but that's not US's fault. Such things has been tried in the past ("use our special DNS servers, and you can type keywords into your browsers address bar", and they died off from simple lack of interest.

I don't see how US could hand over something, which, in the end, is authority by being voluntarily recognized as the authoritative data source by everyone. Even if the US would take the root servers offline, there is no reason why everyone would start using UN's brave new root servers. More likely we would get a period of total chaos as several conflicting DNS namespaces would be in competition against each other.

This entire proposition is nonsensical and should be silently ignored.

Is there any kind of equivalent to Gibson's Law which is "when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have 'saved the Europeans arses'"?

If there's not, then I propose one.

Melanie's law states:

That when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have saved the Europeans arses.

Anyone who uses such an argument in a thread is invoking Melanie's law and like Gibson's law, loses the argument by defaulting.

P.S. The Brits prevented the invasion of the UK by themselves before the US was in the fight and the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.

Um. No. Not even close. Not even all of the root DNS servers managed by US companies and organisations are located in the US due to the fairly recent attempts to DDoS the root servers. There might only be one IP listed for [A-M].ROOT-SERVERS.NET, but each of those IPs has multiple physical hosts behind it that are distributed across the globe. At the present time, less than half of the actual boxes performing the root DNS service are located within the USA, so I think we can realistically expect one hell of a lot of political posturing over the next several months. Given the importance of the Internet to governments and Big Business, this could well turn out to be a bigger political issue than Kyoto.